Punk rock or old time country -- the Handsome Family shows how the different genres are connected at the root.

Scattered

What constitutes folk music today is the subject of wide speculation. Some fans say it must have rural roots, traditional instrumentation, and be passed down from person to person. Others claim that in an age of electronic transmission, any music a person heard as part of the fabric of his or her life is part of that individual’s folk culture. For the Handsome Family, it is a bit of both -- and, as they are creative artists, something more. The band has an ancient sound rich with the ghosts of losers and lovers from centuries past and dwelling amongst us today. The primordial clangs against the contemporary whether the Handsome Family covers an olde ballade or offers a self-penned piece.

This is evident even on the song choices listed on the band’s recent compilation, Scattered: A Further Collection of Lost Demos, Orphaned Songs and Odd Covers. The sequel to Smothered and Covered features demos, outtakes, b-sides, and such performed in all their raggedy glory. This includes renditions of everything from classic rock (the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”), folk rock (Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues"), classic country (Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway”), traditional (“What Does the Deep Sea Say”), and originals (“Snowball”, “A Plague of Humans”) that clearly derive from older folk sources. The covers offer elegant recreations as if dressed in thrift store finery. Consider “Eleanor Rigby”, an overplayed oldie here given a fine bluegrass style accompaniment with Rennie Sparks softly singing of loneliness to husband Brett’s low harmonies. Joined by the Rivet Gang, the Handsome Family makes the song fresh and haunting, the way it sounded when first released by the fab four as a single. That’s not an easy thing to do.

While the covers of classic material stand out here, particularly Brett’s deliberate reading of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” that breathlessly captures the joy and despair of being alone, that does not mean the band lacks a sense of humor, and a black one at that. The self-penned “Beer on the Roof” makes poetry out of the urban scenery (e.g., “the clouds kissed the smokestacks”) even as the dread of sober morning beckons. Brett’s ode to life after a stay in a mental hospital (“Tranquilized”) offers depression as an alternative to drugs. And his “Telephones and Telescopes” inadvertently reveals that one can spend too much time listening to R.E.M.

And as one might expect from such a compilation, there are sui generis gems that defy easy description. The instrumental “Honcho” belongs to that soundtracks to an imaginary western genre, and in this one, the good guy gets to go on another day. However, in the spooky Harlan Howard cover “Blizzard”, the good guy dies in the snowstorm because he won’t desert his horse. The spoken word narrative section’s instrumentation is as desolate as the person telling the story, in contrast to the band’s noisefest “Little Buddha”, where the electric guitars duel steel on steel drumming for who can be louder while the singer warbles about “nuclear war” and “TV screens”. Punk rock or old time country -- the Handsome Family shows how the different genres are connected at the root. In the age of mechanical reproduction, we hear it all as new and hear all as part of everything else.

What sounds old, is for all intents and purposes old. Which is why the Handsome Family can take a song such as “Eleanor Rigby” and show how the Beatles’ tune is now part of our folk tradition, passed from generation to generation through phonographs, CDs, MP3s, whatever. The band knows we are all just lonely people. We are where we came from.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.